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LAW OF THE JUNGLE
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T
o mark the 25th Anniversary of the "April 30" victory of the North Vietnam Communists over the Republic of South Vietnam, Hanoi government released more than 12,000 prisoners including some political dissidents and several death row inmates. But the release, thought to be an action of leniency, has been tainted with blood from a woman sentenced to death and surreptitiously executed.Canada suspended government contacts with Vietnam on Monday, May 1, 2000 and put off annual meetings on development aid to protest the execution of a Vietnamese Canadian woman convicted of drug smuggling.
"We deplore this absolutely unacceptable conduct of the government of Vietnam," Prime Minister Jean Chretien said in reaction to the execution of Ms. Nguyen Thi Hiep, 43 years old, in the morning of April 22 without notifying her relatives or the Canadian Embassy in advance.
Ms. Hiep and her mother Tran Thi Cam 74, were arrested in 1996 after custom's officers at the Noi Bai airport found 12 pounds of heroin with a street value of $5 million hidden inside five lacquer paintings. In 1967, Ms. Hiep was sentenced to death, while her mother was given a life sentence. Both have firmly stated that they hadn't known that illegal drug was concealed inside the artwork. Ms. Hiep and her mother said an acquaintance of their family had asked them to help with transporting the gifts - five lacquer paintings - back to Canada to an address. The acquaintance paid 100 dollars for "expense money."
Canadian authorities and human rights groups asked the Vietnam Communist Party's government to delay the execution because of newly discovered evidence that might prove the women were duped by drug smugglers into transporting the heroin. One hundred dollars was too little for her to risk her life if she had known what was inside the painting frames.
The evidence is based on the testimony of another Vietnamese Canadian woman who was arrested by Canadian police at Pearson Airport after an amount of heroin worth US$ 3.5 million was found inside lacquer paintings she was carrying on the flight back from Vietnam. The woman said some new friends she met on the Cathay Pacific flight from Toronto to Hong Kong asked her to help with bringing lacquer paintings as gifts to an address in Toronto, and she was unaware of the hidden heroin. Strange enough, the man asking her to carry the paintings to Canada is the same man who had Ms. Hiep take his similar paintings to Toronto.
This woman whose name was withheld by the police, willingly cooperated with Canadian police to investigate the scheme of smuggling heroin into Canada. She was released after 6 days detained in a police center, and was declared innocent.
There were many similarities between the two cases: the same kind of heroin in identical plastic pouches hidden in the same kind of lacquer paintings; the two woman and Ms. Hiep, each was paid 100-dollar "expense money" by the same man who asked for their help to hand over the paintings to the same recipient in Toronto. Particularly, Ms. Hiep and her mother were arrested exactly the same day after the other woman was set free in Toronto.
Because of such similarities, Canadian police sent the evidence to Vietnam and Hanoi government promised to review the evidence that included a 50-page document and an audio tapes recording the telephone conversation between the woman arrested in Pearson Airport and the suspect who was supposed to receive the artwork with heroin inside. All the suspects in Canada were convicted and given prison terms up to 14 years.
Besides Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, US President Bill Clinton, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rubin Carter (Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted), Amnesty International and others, all sent urgent notes or calls urging Hanoi government to reconsider the case.
But Ms Hiep was executed by a firing squad surreptitiously without prior announcement, disregarding basic diplomatic traditions and the fact that such action would certainly hurt Canadian and American leaders' prestige.
Canada recalled its ambassador to Hanoi, Cecile Latour, and cutting off help for Vietnam's bid to join the World Trade Organization. On Monday, May 1, the Canadian government announced it also was cutting off ministerial-level contact with Hanoi, except in meetings involving other countries.
In addition, Canada said it would refuse to support Vietnamese candidates for positions in international organizations and suspended the upcoming annual talks on development assistance.
Canadian officials said Vietnam had failed to provide a satisfactory explanation for why the execution took place after previous assurances that Vietnamese authorities would wait to consider new evidence from Canada.
Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy said Canada wanted Vietnam to set free Ms. Hiep's mother, Tran Thi Cam, who is 75, and to return Hiep's remains to her family. Hanoi rejected his request. Ms. Hiep had moved to Canada in 1982 and become a Canadian citizen. Ms. Hiep was executed only five days before her 44th birthday. She has two sons.
The Hanoi Communist government reacted weakly. Its Ministry of Foreign Affairs' released an announcement, saying that "Although the Vietnamese side has received more information relating to the case from Canadian agencies, and Vietnamese functional agencies have considered it seriously, the case of Nguyen Thi Hiep has insufficient legal basis for any trial. The Vietnamese government feels sorry for the reactions from the Canadian government on the implementation of the sentence for Nguyen Thi Hiep by the Vietnamese agencies. The Vietnamese government wishes to continue co-operative ties with Canada on the basis of equality, mutual respect and benefit and for the long-term interest of the two peoples."
There has been not a word from Hanoi Communist authorities explaining the reason why they broke their assurances of delaying the execution to consider new evidence.
If Ms. Hiep knowingly smuggled so much heroin, she deserved to be given the death sentence. Drug trafficking is a major threat to human society and must be eradicated with harsh punishment. In her case, however, evidence provided by the Canadian authorities should have been carefully examined to give her the benefit of the doubt as any court of justice of a civilized country would do.
Wayson Choy in his article "Red Petals on a Faraway Grave" published in The Global and Mail, issue May 2, describes the execution as quoted below:
"It happened at dawn on Saturday, April 22. Five days before her 44th birthday, Nguyen Thi Hiep, a Canadian citizen and the mother of two sons, was secretly shot by an official Vietnamese firing squad, her body lifted into a plain box, and dirt piled into the hole swallowing up her coffin. One hour later, the rains began to fall."
"The dates and time - it was 6 a.m. - do not matter. Only the rain matters."
"The storm pouring down from the sky persisted all day and through the night."
"Not until late Sunday did the sun come out, and not until Monday, two days after Ms. Nguyen's execution, did a Vietnamese official provide written confirmation of her death."
"Why the delay? Perhaps, as in government offices elsewhere, no official was working that rainy weekend. And a death certificate must be properly signed, witnessed and registered. After locking the petite woman in a damp cell for nearly four years, her jailers must have thought a further delay of two days trivial."
In another part of his article, Wayson Choy wrote:
"At their last monthly meeting, Ms. Nguyen's husband noted how she had to be supported by two others to hobble into the visitor's block. Her eyes squinting, she stooped as the guard unshackled one wrist for her to grasp the clumsy speaker-phone. 'For my birthday,' she said, weakly, 'bring me red roses.'"
"Why the absolute secrecy about that weekend of Ms. Nguyen's assigned execution? Why the two-day notification delay after her execution?"
"Tran Hieu, her husband, may find some peace in his wife's outright refusal to sign any final confession of guilt. The inquisitor even tempted her with food. She shook her head; instead, the other prisoners told Tran, she spoke of her innocence, again and again. As she was taken away to her death that overcast dawn, her last words were to call out her husband's name - 'Hieu! Hieu!' - her voice loud enough to be heard by other prisoners... 'Hieu! Hieu! Hieu!'"
"Finally, Ms. Nguyen was roughly bound to a pole and gagged, her voice muffled. The shots exploded in the dawn. Minutes after, her husband was informed."
"An hour after the execution, Tran Hieu observed how the rain burst from the sky. 'The killing field,' the husband told the sons, 'was flooded.' Every day since, he has brought flowers to the prison grave."
Choy concluded, "Before long, certain persons in Vietnam will, like some ancient bureaucrat, scrub their hands of the whole civilized savagery as some petty nuisance. I wonder, might they notice - is it possible? - that they wash their fingers in a basin not of water, but of blood."
In The London Free Press May-9 issue, E.W. Sashegyi, who was living in Hungary under the 1945-1956 Communist rule, wrote:
"My sincere condolences go to the family of Nguyen Thi Hiep, the latest victim of an ideology and a movement that was responsible for the deaths of about a 100 million people world-wide during the 20th century."
"Hiep's execution is a tragedy, but we may hope that something good may come of it as it focuses media attention once more on the nature of communism in general and in particular on the successors of what U.S. President Ronald Reagan once called the "evil empire.'"
And "Nguyen Thi Hiep's execution is a chilly reminder of Bolshevik ways and methods. We can only hope it is an eye-opener for officials in high places whose cynical backroom strategists believe that time somehow invalidates crime and that the human rights issue in international trade negotiations is just something Jean Chretien can mumble a few words about before getting down to business as usual."
"I am shocked by Hiep's cruel death, but, unlike Axworthy, I am not surprised."
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Currently, Ms. Hiep's husband keeps visiting her ailing mother still incarcerated in Thanh Xuan Prison near Hanoi, providing her with food and medicine. She is still unaware of the death of her daughter. No one dares to let her know the news that would kill her with unbearable shock. Ms. Hiep's body is still lying in the shallow grave, 700 meters from the prison camp and in the middle of a low field often inundated when it rains.
Lawyer James Lockyer, appointed by Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted to represent Ms. Hiep and her mother, was working with his remarkable insight into the problems in dealing with the Communists. He was against Carter's proposal to raise loud protests to save them lest it should offend Hanoi leaders.
After the execution, Lockyer has admitted that he did make a fatal mistake and that he would be suffering the pangs of remorse all the rest of his life for not taking Carter's advice.
Many people think that there must be some secret reason for the execution in a hurry without prior announcement. This reason must be so important that Hanoi decided to accept hurtful reactions from Canada, the nation which has heartily supported Hanoi in the last two decades.
Rumors go that the case may have involved Communist central or local leaders, who were either backing the drug traffic or taking part in the failed bargaining for kickbacks in exchange for the pardon of Ms. Hiep. So they had to execute Ms. Hiep to keep her silent forever.
Another possibility is that some responsible official might have decided the quick execution, bypassing his or her superiors just to show off and assert his authority.
In Vietnam today, such assumptions often turn out to be true.
If Hanoi keeps refusing to release Ms. Hiep's 74-year-old mother and to return her remains to her relatives for a decent funeral, there will be more reasons to believe that Hanoi is trying to conceal and destroy evidence of some flagrant criminal conspiracy.
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